The present invention relates to a portable wireless imaging system.
As the popularity of digital cameras grows, the desire of digital camera users to share their images with others will also continue to grow. The best approaches to photo-sharing take advantage of the Internet. One such approach is for users to store the digital images on a PC and then send the images to others using email. Several Internet companies now offer an even more convenient approach by providing photo-sharing websites that allow users to store their images for free and to arrange the images into web-based photo albums. Once posted on a photo-sharing website, others may view the images over the Internet.
While convenient for storing digital images, getting the images to the photo-sharing websites can be challenging for users. Most commonly, users must upload their images from the digital camera to a PC using a cable or IrDA, or by inserting the camera's flash card into the PC. From the PC, the user logs onto the Internet and uploads the images to a photo-sharing website. After uploading the images, the user works on the website to arrange the images into web albums and to add any textual information.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,453,361 discussed an approach to uploading images to the web that does not require the use of a PC. In this approach, an email software application is loaded into a digital camera capable of running software that allows the user to e-mail the images directly from the camera. The user simply connects his or her digital camera to a cellphone or modem, runs the e-mail application, and selects the desired images and the email recipients. The selected images are then sent to the recipients as e-mail attachments.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,453,361 also disclosed a meta-application architecture for integrating photo-service-based websites. The online system includes a plurality of client devices capable of storing and displaying digital images, wherein a portion of the client devices communicate data in different formats. The system also includes a plurality of online photo-service sites, wherein each of the photo-service sites utilize different data models. The online system further includes a server for communicating with both the client devices and the photo-service sites over a network. A meta-application is also provided that is accessible by the server for defining a common data model format for the different formats of the photo-service sites. In operation, when a request is received from a client device for photo-services from a particular photo-service site, the request is passed to the photo-service site. When a response from the photo-service site is received, the response is converted from the data model of the photo-service site to the common data model format, and the converted request is then presented to the requesting client device in the data format required by the requesting client device.
Although emailing photos directly from the camera allows users who do not own a PC to share images over the Internet, these users must still establish accounts with both an Internet service provider (ISP) and the photo-sharing website before being able to post their images. Cameras are not designed for text entry, and the information required may be somewhat technical in nature. Consequently, establishing the accounts by entering account and configuration data on the digital camera itself may prove to be a difficult task for most users.